Man taking ownership

We have a wave-function which is the unique, significant form of the coherent organism, a macroscopic quantum object, which has a macroscopic wave-function that is always evolving, always changing as it entangles its environment.

We do know there have been changes or circles in climate changes but what we are facing now does not fit that picture. The change is triggered by our abuse of the system.

Man went away form the Creator and lost connection with Him and with His Creation. You can say

a bond was broken; a shade of mutuality has withered and waned. Now everything becomes merely external and separate from everything else.{Professor l. k. Tong}*

Man has taken nature as something they own and are free to use no matter what it would mean to that other species. Lots of them have just become ‘Takers’ clinging with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man.

They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. This mythology of human specialness justifies their doing whatever they please with the world, just the way Hitler’s mythology of Aryan superiority justified his doing whatever he pleased with Europe. But in the end this mythology is not deeply satisfying. The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness.” {Ishmael}*

Man taken liberties on his path to consumerism

Carnal and corruptibleMan has taken too many liberties, though still many do not mind going on mis-using nature. Lots of people do not want to change their behaviour and continue to over-use natural sources.

They forget that

There is no separation of man and his environment; rather there is a fusion of man and his environment. Ecology represents the study of the ecological entity as a whole. When a given ecological complex appears unfavorable from the standpoint of man, for example, he does not have a prior claim to adjustment on the part of the other elemen (ts of the complex. The others have just as much “right” to demand modification of his behavior as he has on theirs. All are one in Nature. The appreciation of this Oneness and the delicate interrelationships of its diffusions represents the prime academic purpose of the Ecology Series. (The Land of Keikitran and Eleevan) {R.G.H. Siu}*

The denial of climate change of certain economists and big international concerns, mocking at concerned consumers, may be leaders of a millenarian cult as mad as, and more dangerous than, any religious fundamentalism. The consumerism and irresponsible development promoted by those irresponsible people has been under fire the last few months, with good reason.

Environmental issues and Laudato si’

Pope Francis I’s second encyclical letter (2015) addressed to all of humanity on environmental issues, our place in creation and responsibility towards our common home.

On June, 18, 2015, the the second encyclical of Pope FrancisLaudato si‘ (Medieval Central Italian for “Praise Be to You”), dated 24 May 2015, was officially published and the Vatican released the document in Italian, German, English, Spanish, French, Polish, Portuguese and Arabic.

For sure there are certain environmental issues where it is not easy to achieve a broad consensus and it is not up to churches or religious organisations to settle scientific questions or to replace politics. But religious people cannot stay untouched by what human creatures are doing with the creation of the Most High. Therefore it is good to notice that the leader of the big Catholic community is concerned to encourage an honest and open debate so that particular interests or ideologies will not prejudice the common good.

Natural environment gravely damaged by godman

Hard copies of the encyclical have been published by Ignatius Press. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Benedict XVI asked previously also to recognize that the natural environment has been gravely damaged by our irresponsible behaviour. He and this pope reminds us that it is not only the ecological but also the social environment which has also suffered damage.

“where we ourselves have the final word, where everything is simply our property and we use it for ourselves alone. The misuse of creation begins when we no longer recognize any higher instance than ourselves, when we see nothing else but ourselves” {Address to the Clergy of the Diocese of Bolzano-Bressanone(6 August 2008): AAS 100 (2008), 634.}

Green declaration for oneness of humanity

It is that selfishness which shall be able to ruin us if we do not take care and take an other crossroad.

The 14th Dalai Lama had also previously often said human beings should be more careful with mother nature and issued a Twitter message, three days before the encyclical, stating:

“Since climate change and the global economy now affect us all, we have to develop a sense of the oneness of humanity.”

We need to change and develop new convictions, attitudes and forms of life, including a new lifestyle. This requires not only individual conversion, but also community networks to solve the complex situation facing our world today. Essential to this is a spirituality that can motivate us to a more passionate concern for the protection of our world. Christian spirituality proposes a growth and fulfilment marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little. Love, overflowing with small gestures of mutual care, is also civic and political, and it makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world.

Putting aside our greed and taking Care for the poor

We are not faced with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis that is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.

We may not forget that those who use polluting production have their plants often in cheap regions in the midst of poor people. Often it are the poorer who are victim of the greed of the rich. The poor also often live in areas directly affected by sea level rise and desertification

the majority of our megacities and a quarter of the world’s population live near the coast. If sea level rise puts Bangladesh underwater, as some scientists think is inevitable, 100 million people will be displaced, and the vast majority are poor. {The genius of Laudato Si’ should make us all uncomfortable}

Those people often do not have enough resources to protect themselves, to get proper water and live in cleaner healthier surroundings.

The pope warns that the destruction of the human environment is extremely serious

Looking for solutions

We not only have to look for solutions in technology but also in a change of humanity; otherwise we would be dealing merely with symptoms, and that is already what is going wrong in the medical field in the industrialised countries where the chemical industry fight against the alternative medicine and does everything to get people away from homoeopathic and phytotherapeutic medicines. there we can find how many people do not like it to have an other system existing next to their more lucrative system.

John Zizioulas, Eastern Orthodox metropolitan of Pergamon, presents the encyclical Laudato si’ at the Press conference in Rome

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, with whome the pope and his followers share the hope of full ecclesial communion, has drawn attention to the ethical and spiritual roots of environmental problems, which require that we look for solutions not only in technology but in a change of humanity. He asks us to replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a spirit of sharing, an asceticism which

“entails learning to give, and not simply to give up. It is a way of loving, of moving gradually away from what I want to what God’s world needs. It is liberation from fear, greed and compulsion”. {Lecture at the Monastery of Utstein, Norway (23 June 2003). + Paris meeting 21 July 20015}

Saint Francis of Assisi example par excellence of care for the vulnerable

The pope reminds us of this Italian religious leader who founded the religious order known as the Franciscans, that his response to the world around him was so much more than intellectual appreciation or economic calculus, for to him each and every creature was a sister united to him by bonds of affection.

His father, Pietro di Bernardone, was a successful cloth merchant, and Francis grew up with a love of fine clothes and good times. He led the other young men of the town in enjoying good food and drink, singing, and dancing. He was educated in math, poetry, and music and learned to read and write while attending a school that was part of the Church of Saint Giorgio of Assisi. Francis was expected to become a cloth merchant like his father and did not plan to attend college. Francis joined the forces from Assisi in their fight against Perugia, another town in Italy. When he was twenty, he was taken prisoner. A year later, sobered by jail and sickness, he underwent several religious experiences in quick succession.

Francis’s father, furious that his son wasted his money on churches and beggars, took him before the bishop to bring him to his senses. When the hearing began, Francis calmly took off all of his clothes, gave them to his father (the astonished bishop quickly covered Francis with a cloak), and said that he was now recognizing only his Father in heaven, not his father on earth. He lived his life from this time on without money and without family ties, dressing in himself in rags.

He would call creatures, no matter how small, by the name of ‘brother’ or ‘sister’”

Immanuel Wallerstein giving a talk at a seminar at the European University at St. Petersburg (May 24, 2008)

Immanuel Wallerstein and others looked at this world and saw some World Systems Theory, noticing that the world as a whole has an economic system dominated by a rich metropolitan centre (as in USA and Europe) that benefits from unequal material exchange with a more extensive and poorer periphery (much of Africa, Asia and Latin America).

Wallerstein’s early criticism of global capitalism and championship of “anti-systemic movements” have recently made him an éminence grise with the anti-globalization movement within and outside of the academic community, along with Noam Chomsky and Pierre Bourdieu. He anticipated the growing importance of the North-South divide at a time when the main world conflict was the Cold War. For him the United States is a ‘hegemon in decline’ in a world where virtually every area has been incorporated into the capitalist world-economy, where natural resources, land, labour, and human relationships are gradually being stripped of their “intrinsic” value and turned into commodities in a market which dictates their exchange value.

Association with extensive body of radical progressive thinking

The pope writes

The theory, along with ideas like ecological debt, is closely associated with an extensive body of radical progressive thinking that has developed synergistically also with liberation theology. This body of thought has been especially vibrant in Latin America. It is extensively and knowledgeably referred to, both explicitly and implicitly, throughout the encyclical, and particularly in the passages leading up to the cited statement. {Laudato Si’: on a glimpse of theory masked in translation}

How do we want to think? How do we want to place ourselves in the thinking community?
Where do we want to put our priorities. How many are convinced that the priorities should not only be about ourselves?

Certainly in the newer generation of young people there are those who believe we need to make ourselves our number one.

Your health, your body, your mind. Those must be first, because if you’re not happy with you, how can you be happy with others? {Priorities}

Such people are right in thinking they have to come at ease with themselves first. But when they are looking at themselves in the mirror and thinking

We can only hope they do not forget to change their habits and we only can hope by thinking about themselves they also shall think about the others. It is wrong to think they cannot change their habits because they forget to put their ‘self‘ first. They should know that it is essential also to think about what is better for others. What went wrong in our society is that too many put all their focus on their self and placed themselves before everything else.

Believe in self and in future for the self and others

People do have to place themselves in their own environment, believe in themselves and trust themselves in such a way that they not have to rely all the time on others.

It is just our attitude to others, trying to help them better themselves to make their life easier to make them smile or just make sure they know they are not alone, is what makes us to be ‘humans‘. But by allowing ourselves to be carried away by consumerism and capitalism we have put our humanity and humanism often aside.

Man has to change his perception on the terms that has seen sprawled and depicted in this very sly, capitalist, greedy world, where emotions are pushed away and with involvement are being considered weaknesses. Most people prefer to stay in their comfort-zone and do not want to let others know what they really think or do not want to become involved in matters concerning the way we live. they perhaps do know that when people help in their own little ways they can help to make this world a beautiful place.

As humans, we’re influenced by society and those around us and I sometimes feel that we’re programmed to look for the negative in life. {The powers of positive thinking}

16 Responses to Time to consider how to care for our common home

I would like to ask you to reread my blog because what you inserted here from mine, you’re not seeming to get my message. I am not saying we need to put ourselves ALL the time, I’m saying we need to focus on our HEALTH, our BODIES, and our MINDS. Not our needs, so I ask that you reread my blog before you go and quote me and pick and choose what you want to use to make your point well and slander my word.

Find different writers on two sites founded by me

Recent Posts: Stepping Toes

The Jewish Museum of New York her latest core exhibition reveals a distance from Judaism indistinguishable from disregard, embarrassment, and disdain. Menachem Wecker’s essay on Scenes from the Collection, the latest permanent exhibition at the Jewish Museum of New York, talks about the city’s venerable 115-year-old Jewish Museum. Its collection of about 30,000 objects makes […]

Originally posted on Dear Kitty. Some blog: https://youtu.be/gQOBDCSQKbw This 10 April 2019 video says about itself: First-Ever Black Hole Image Released The Event Horizon Telescope captured an image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. From USA Today today: It’s our first glimpse of one of the weirdest spectacles in…

Originally posted on Purplerays: ‘Tis hard for man to rouse his spirit up–It is the human creative agony,Though but to hold the heart an empty cup,Or tighten on the team the rigid rein.Many will rather lie among the slainThan creep through narrow ways the light to gain–Than wake the will, and be born bitterly. But…

Originally posted on Victors' Corner: WHAT TOLERANCE REALLY MEANS By Victor Uyanwanne 13/03/2015 I have always been interested in learning new words and I have usually made conscious effort towards achieving that aim. I remember way back in school when we were much younger when we used to keep “New Words and Meaning” notebooks as…

Recent Posts: From guestwriters

The great museums of the 18th and 19th centuries — the British Museum in London (1753), the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg (1764), the Louvre in Paris (1792), the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (1891), and many others — were encyclopedic in scope and ambition. Born, in part, of an imperial impulse, they aimed to demonstrate […]

Originally posted on A Window Of Wisdom: “When we are unable to face the truth of our own feelings, we will vent our emotional pain upon anyone that goes against what we are trying to control, due to the exhaustion of representing our self as the truth, we wish we could be.” True freedom can…

Originally posted on Chai & Biscuits: I always wonder, what is outside the window? I can’t hear anything because the window screen filters any noise of the living from inside out and outside in. The unanswered screams, now I know them. In the distance I can see the clouds being populated and polluted with the smoke which…